Over the past two years, I was proud to be part of a group of experts working to make U.S. environmental and public health policies more effective. As part of the Cumulative Impacts workgroup of the National Environmental Justice Advisory Council (NEJAC), it was exciting to work with and learn from some of the leading minds from community organizations, academia, state and municipal governments, nonprofits and the private sector. We produced a report full of recommendations for how the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency could use a cumulative impacts approach to improve their efforts to protect our health and safety.
Unfortunately, in the wake of the last presidential election, this work is likely to fall by the wayside. A wrecking crew of polluters and ideologues is targeting the federal government’s ability to get scientific input.
The importance of good advice
Federal advisory committees (FACs) are a vital form of public participation. A variety of experts meet multiple times, sometimes over years, to share in-depth understanding of an issue and provide advice directly to government agency staff and leadership. They provide a real, consequential way for the public to influence government decisions and make sure those decisions are based on the evidence. As you might expect, they’ve become a target for an administration dead-set on rolling back safeguards and ignoring serious problems. There has been a regular pattern of disruptive committee composition changes, canceled meetings, disbanded panels, and slow-walking of crucial work—which has hindered federal agencies’ ability to make well-informed, equitable, and ultimately effective decisions. The UCS Center for Science and Democracy is closely tracking the Trump administration’s ongoing efforts to dismantle these committees.
The Trump administration has eliminated the Census Bureau’s Science Advisory Committee and the United States Geological Survey (USGS) Committee for Science Quality and Integrity. The former means less science advice to develop the 2030 census, the largest non-wartime civic mobilization effort in the United States. Terminating the Committee for Science Quality and Integrity means less expert advice about clean water and earthquakes, as well as less capacity to prevent the recurrence of USGS scientific integrity violations. The Trump administration has delayed and cancelled meetings for the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, and the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee. Consequently, the fall flu vaccine planning does not include their expert guidance, which could limit the effectiveness of the flu vaccine in the upcoming flu season. Moreover, the Trump administration is “resetting,” or changing all of the membership of, both the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Science Advisory Board and the Clean Air Act Science Advisory Committee.
FACs also have workgroups assigned to them to focus on specific topics relevant to the committee. Specifically, committee recommendations are written by these workgroups. I was honored to be invited to co-chair one such FAC workgroup to support and inform NEJAC. When we started in early 2023, EPA gave our workgroup a charge to gather evidence and research about cumulative impacts: its definition and purpose, how to implement it, and how to make sure the policy process addresses the disparities between communities that are overburdened by multiple sources and types of pollutants and those communities that are less so. We spent two years collaborating, and in August of 2024 we published our recommendations in a report entitled “Reducing Cumulative and Disproportionate Impacts and Burdens in Environmental Justice Communities.” These recommendations are useful beyond federal government work, which is why UCS developed factsheets on each of the recommendation themes.
Where NEJAC stands today
Unfortunately, there are no NEJAC meetings currently posted on the EPA NEJAC website. Furthermore, although EPA established a workgroup in 2024 to research Title VI (Civil Rights) topics, issued a charge to the workgroup, and received public comment, a recommendation document is not yet on the EPA NEJAC reports website. Both scheduled meetings and a finalized report online should have been completed by now. Behind the scenes, it is even more concerning. Key personnel from EPA’s Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights (OEJECR), which coordinates the NEJAC, are still on administrative leave, and the office itself has been threatened with closure. Without this staff, the EPA lacks the capacity to support environmental justice efforts or external advisors, like those on the NEJAC, who have spent years crafting recommendations that shine an investigative light on overburdened communities, many of which are low-income or communities of color. This leaves the agency without key guidance. The OEJECR, is charged with delivering clean air, water, and land where it’s needed most, simply can’t function without staff inside the agency and advisors from outside. This represents not just a loss of people, but of institutional memory, expertise, and momentum—and it undermines the ability to craft policies that help eliminate disparities. The NEJAC is a storied group, with participation from knowledgeable leaders and experts in the field of environmental justice, and worth learning more about.
For several decades, the NEJAC has provided advice on all aspects of EPA work concerning environmental justice, which, simply put is the right of all Americans to have the same environmental protections and benefits, and the same access to participate in policies and decisions that impact our health, livelihood, and surroundings. My colleague Jules Barbati-Dajches describes science advisory committees as “Science at the Table.” The NEJAC brings a very broad variety of experts to the table, including people with expertise in science, but also representatives who understand different communities and specific topics. The NEJAC also brings together Tribal governments, state and local governments, legal experts, and business and industry. In short, it brings a much-needed breadth of informed perspectives to the table. The council provides independent advice and recommendations to the EPA Administrator about a broad range of strategic, scientific, technological, regulatory, community engagement and economic issues related to environmental justice. The NEJAC was established by Carol Browner, the EPA Administrator at the time, on September 30, 1993 under the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA). (You can learn more about the NEJAC here in Spanish, Chinese, Portuguese, and Vietnamese.)
FACs work within the bounds of written charters. For the NEJAC, this requires public meetings and public comment periods, which further broadens the ability of the EPA to hear from people impacted by its decisions and actions. The NEJAC charter also establishes requirements around their membership, which must include—but is not limited to—candidates from community-based groups; industry and business; academic and educational institutions; state and local governments; indigenous organizations; federally recognized Tribal governments and Indigenous groups; non-governmental organizations; and environmental groups. This is a foundational principle of groups like the NEJAC: learning from people who understand the issue and its impacts. If you want to learn how to run a basketball league, you ask players, coaches, fans, venue operators and equipment vendors. You learn from people with deep experience, the ones who live and breathe the sport. The same is true for making policy.
What has the NEJAC done?
The NEJAC has worked on a wide variety of cross-cutting topics, including the revitalization of brownfields —land spaces that may be polluted and have been abandoned or are underused. The first recommendation document from the NEJAC to the EPA was published in July of 1996 and focused on environmental justice and permitting authority. It lays out potential permit conditions, describes and discusses decisions related to EPA’s permitting authority from the Environmental Appeals Boards, and surveys federal laws laying out a legal basis for limiting or conditioning permits. All of their work is centered around environmental justice issues integrated into the core programs and activities of the EPA.
In 2004, the EPA NEJAC wrote recommendations advising EPA to work on and implement ways to assess and address cumulative risks and impacts in communities with multiple stressors, like heavily trafficked highways, petrochemical facilities, existing high asthma rates, and a lack of access to quality healthcare. This was an effort to better match regulations and voluntary efforts to reduce pollution with the reality of how people are exposed to pollution. Later, in the mid-2000’s, the NEJAC wrote a recommendations document related to disaster preparedness along the Gulf Coast. This included ways for EPA to address vulnerabilities in all communities in the aftermath of natural disasters like Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. The NEJAC’s process brought together community members impacted by these hurricanes, which allowed the recommendations to be informed by those most impacted by these natural disasters. Later, in 2017, the NEJAC wrote a letter to the EPA administrator supporting worker protection standards that protect farmworkers from pesticide exposures, which are associated with harm to the respiratory system, brain, and immune system. Just these few examples show how wide-reaching and consequential NEJAC’s work has been, with the motivation to always center the populations who are most impacted by its topic areas.
The fact that there are no scheduled meetings for the NEJAC and that they have been removed from the website listing EPA FACs is extremely worrisome. So far, the NEJAC hasn’t been formerly rescinded. That could happen either through a process initiated by the EPA administrator—or, even more insultingly, by simply ignoring these experts and not renewing the NEJAC’s charter in 2026. The NEJAC writes strong recommendations, but responding to and implementing NEJAC recommendations is the work of the EPA. Without the NEJAC, EPA has limited access to this type of valuable expertise. Without a strong EPA we all lose out, because we all depend on clean air, water, and land. It’s not just a set of scientists or a report that’s at risk here; it’s all of us.
UCS and dozens of organizations have formally urged EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin to protect science at the EPA. You can read that letter here, and sign on here. You can also call your Members of Congress and urge them to pressure Administrator Zeldin to halt and reverse the steps he is taking to weaken the agency that is charged by law to protect our health and our environment.